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03/25/19

The position is a two-year post-doc in the Academy Scholars Program at Harvard’s Academy for International and Area Studies. At Harvard, Sophia will be working on my first book. Based on my ethnographic research in Kenya and in the U.S., the book shows that international humanitarian discourses prize the family and family unity, yet “family composition fraud” constitutes a major concern for UN, NGOs, and government bodies that oversee refugee resettlement. Meanwhile, practices that bureaucrats call “fraud” are often described by refugees as ways of fulfilling obligations to kin. The book argues that “the family” as a concept is deployed to make claims about rights to move and occupy different spaces across the globe, and simultaneously about the need to police and control such mobility. As refugee resettlement programs intersect with social life in post-war East African landscapes, a securitized humanitarianism shapes the politics of transnational families on borderlands between the global North and South.

Professor Fennell of the Department of Anthropology presented an invited paper on the New Philadelphia Archaeological Project under the tile “Resilience and Racism in a 19th Century American Heartland: New Philadelphia and the Vagaries of Prejudice.”